Jeff said, Thank you, Pemberton. I’m going to show Miss Howell around and then we’ll go back to The Hurricane shortly, so no need to untack. Just water and a little hay to keep them busy. Then come find us. If Miss Howell has questions about what we’ve done here and what we plan to do, I might need your help explaining.
As Pemberton led the horses away, V couldn’t stop looking at him. She had expected him to be some deep friend from West Point, a fellow newly minted lieutenant up on the northern frontier—half of a special pairing that human males make in late adolescence and sometimes have a hard time giving up.
Instead, Jeff owned Pemberton, held title to him. Legal papers.
V said, So, how long . . . ?
Jeff said, Since I was fourteen.
WALKING INSIDE THE HOUSE jolted the senses. The main room stretched long and dark, like a grand hallway. The little dim windows with the sills very high felt even odder from inside, like something to shoot arrows at attackers from, except you’d need a tall ladder to do it. Scant furniture hovered around cavernous fireplaces at either end of the long room, and no paintings marred the high walls. Dimensions warped and distorted, the geometry strange and lacking correspondence to human scale. All it needed was for the walls to stand out of parallel with each other and the floors to slope at several angles to make the place truly crazy.
V walked twice around the room trying to think of something to say. She settled in front of one of the giant fireplaces. She could almost walk into it. A fire hardly bigger around than the lid to a stewpot smoked in one corner like an afterthought.
She finally said, Well, this looks like it was built in Queen Elizabeth’s time, to roast a sheep whole.
A woman came out from the kitchen and asked if they would like tea or coffee.
They took their coffee outside in chairs under a big live oak to the side of the house. In a few minutes, Pemberton came carrying a cup of tea and without a word sat down with them, which seemed unusual to V.
V said, I hear you were up in the north woods?
Pemberton said, A long time ago, miss.
Jeff said, Pemberton and I—for a lark—made the first known overland passage from Prairie du Chien to Chicago.
—Mainly to get away from that muddy fort for a while, Pemberton said.
THE THREE OF THEM walked out past the kitchen gardens and the cow barn and horse barn, all scaled smaller than at The Hurricane because Brierfield only encompassed a thousand acres. Jeff and Pemberton explained that they still had plans to clear a couple hundred more acres for cotton someday but didn’t want to lose all the woods.
Pemberton said, This place didn’t get its name for nothing. First time we saw it, this place was a tangle. Plenty of cutting and burning—plenty of brush piles and log piles. Smoke in the air for years.
Jeff said, You remember that day we let the burn pile get out of hand?
Pemberton laughed and said, We nearly burned the world down.
Pemberton pointed nearby—a couple of hundred feet—and told how, as they cleared for the house site, they piled brush and pines and root ends of hardwoods to the size of a biggish cow barn. Said they’d let the pile dry for the months it took to build the house and then doused it with not much coal oil at four points of the compass and struck fire. The pile sizzled for a few minutes trying to find its voice, and then it went up with a great roaring suck of air that lifted the hat off Jeff’s head and spun it high in the sky and then pulled it into the flames that stood taller than the tops of the biggest trees. The hat burned in one quick fizz. Before long, the wind carried the fire into the living woods. The pines caught first and the needles burned fast with a sound like tearing paper and flashed great sparks, and soon the woods were burning down and black smoke rose at a steep pitch toward heaven.
—God or chance, one saved the house, Pemberton said. The wind faced square around and shoved the fire back over black land it had just crossed. It soon burned out to smoke and embers.
He looked at Jeff and said, I’ll never forget the look on your face when your hat flew off.
Jeff laughed and said, Maybe short judgment on both our parts in regard to the wind and closeness of the burn pile to the new house and the woods.
V AND JEFF took a roundabout path back to The Hurricane, often at a gallop, daring each other to jump ditches and fences and downed tree trunks. And then, both of them still flushed and breathing hard from the wild ride, Jeff tried to kiss her in the barn aisle. The light was dim and brown except where high western windows cast angling yellow beams. Dust of hay drifted in the beams and hovered and disappeared into darkness.
The strange light flattered Jeff, made him look dramatic as an actor on a stage. He leaned into her, and she only had to touch his shoulder with a finger to ease him back.
That night V wrote to her mother:
I do not know whether this Jeff Davis is young or old. He looks both at times. But he must be old. I hear he is only two years younger than you are. He seems remarkable, but of uncertain temper. He takes for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me. Yet he has a sweet voice and a winning manner of asserting himself. He is the kind of person who would rescue you from a mad dog at any risk, but then insist on stoical indifference to the fright afterward.
Love from Your daughter in exile,
V
What she didn’t describe to her mother was that she found him very handsome in a lean, bony way. And he was bookish—adored words whether on the page or delivered in oratory. Out at Brierfield she had noticed stacks of books on a table by a leather chair. He had told her that what he wanted at sixteen was to study law so that he would have time to write. Told her that in another world he might have had a happy life as a small-town lawyer scribbling poetry and history in his office when he should have been dealing with real estate contracts or petty lawsuits. But when Jeff was fourteen, Joseph began calling upon connections among the wealthy men of the state, and eventually West Point began the arc of Jeff’s destiny. And as he emerged from his long mourning—which in itself seemed romantic to seventeen-year-old V—he had become interested in politics, especially writing and delivering speeches. He was thinking about running for public office someday—by which V assumed he meant on a local or state level. She wrote the words The Briers and Brierfield over and over in her notebook, wondering if there might be some interconnection, some motif worth noting. An affinity or a warning.
DAYS AFTER HER TOUR OF BRIERFIELD, V kept trying to understand Jeff and Pemberton. And Benjamin Montgomery as well. She grew up a town girl and their beautiful rental home seldom required more than a cook and a couple of house servants and a man to take care of the lawn and their few horses. Her family never had individual servants around long enough to know them well. They came and went because of WB’s theory—why take on the responsibilities of ownership when you can rent?
She knew true cotton plantations were meant to be horrific places, but Old Joe’s strange version of Owenist social ideas confused her. She resolved to read up on the topic. And Jeff’s friendship with Pemberton also confused her. She assumed that on Jeff’s side of the pair, he had depended on Pemberton for all sorts of things over the years. At West Point, Pemberton would have taken care of laundry, cleaned the room, polished boots, emptied wastebaskets, carried letters to post, transported embargoed liquor in and out of the dormitory. All those student needs. Later, up in the forests of the north wilderness—way past so many furcations of the Mississippi that it cut a path through the land no wider than a common river—she imagined Pemberton’s jobs would have been to chop wood, carry water, build fires, butcher deer, saddle horses, brush dirt off buckskin jackets at day’s end. They had known each other before V was born, and they treated each other as friends. But even then, seventeen, she knew that could not be the full relationship.
A lifetime later—Jeff and Pemberton both dead and V living in New York City, much to the anger of the southern press—she tried to jot
a thought about the two men, a memory, a brief note about them for her own memoir, having recently worn herself to the nub finishing Jeff’s after he died in the middle of his opening chapters.
She wrote:
Don’t think about the existence of an artifact representative of that time, the whipping post. It played no direct part in their decades together. One could be with them for days and forget that their fundamental relationship was anything but friendship and respect and mutual responsibility stretching back to youth. But then something would happen. A small shift in Jeff’s tone of voice asking for the second time that some minor task be done, a moment of ignoring Pemberton as if he weren’t there. Flashes of language and particular tones of rudeness revealed that the relationship between the two men was deeply complex. That the fundamental note of their long history together condensed to a simple fact—one member of the friendship was owner and the other was both labor and capital. And then the shadow of that post traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.
WHEN V FINALLY MADE IT BACK to Natchez in March, sort of engaged to Jeff—but more on that later—she asked around about Pemberton’s dollar worth, describing in general a bondman of his qualifications—his experience, his subtlety, his mannerly way of communicating, his skill in navigating the gulf between owners and workers. She omitted his literacy and his love of newspapers, which might have skewed the results. Estimates were, Pemberton would cost as much as the house a blacksmith or baker or milliner lived in, maybe even as much as Jeff’s finest thoroughbred.
V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up where and when she did. From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But she began feeling the strangeness of it at about nine or ten—not the wrongness or the sin of it, the strangeness only. The sense that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed. And that she stood on one side and others stood across—free on her side, enslaved on the other. For the poorest southern whites or northern women and children working fourteen hours a day in the satanic mills of Yankee factories, the line between slave and free might have been only a foot across—but even then it cut deep, a bottomless chasm. Yet the only determinant of which side you occupied was a paper-thin layer of skin, a fraction of blood degree.
After a few months with Winchester as her tutor, she asked him who drew that line. He said some people believed God drew it. He had her read Luke 12:47—about how the slave that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes. Winchester told her that many plantation owners kept that page turned down for quick reference. He told her she would find quite a few inconsistencies in that book and in the beliefs of Christians and suggested she think about the relationship between wealth and power and morality in regard to drawing lines.
As epiphanies go, her young recognition amounted to not much, except it seemed so for her then. Over the years with Winchester she came to know that people have enslaved each other from time immemorial. Spin the globe and point to a location and probably find slaves sometime in history. Study the golden enlightened Greeks and their marvelous language and history and mythology as she did for years, and you’ll see Socrates and his comrades thinking lofty thoughts while pretty slave girls and boys pour their wine and less pretty ones pick and stomp the grapes. The Yankees’ holy Puritan forefathers owned slaves almost from the moment they set foot on the continent. V’s New Jersey governor grandfather owned slaves all through his eight terms. As a teacher, Winchester didn’t advocate beyond adhering to facts as far as we can know them. The context of history ruled. He scoffed if she just talked about what she believed without supporting evidence. So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.
WHEN SHE LEFT DAVIS BEND for Natchez after an intense two months of daily courtship, she and Jeff had not become fully engaged, but they had put a hold on forming other entanglements. She was so young, and her parents needed to weigh in, though Jeff felt confident that her father would not offer an impediment.
Jeff accompanied her to the dock and leaned in for a full-on good-bye kiss. But distracted by memory—its habit of looping and echoing—V thought of Winchester at that same spot. She turned her head at the final second to take a glancing blow on her cheek. She said a confused good-bye and then rushed up the stage to the riverboat.
In a letter written a day afterward, Jeff asked,
When we parted at the river, how did you happen to call me by your Father’s name? I’ve been so worried you are ill.
V wrote back.
My apologies for misspeaking. Take for granted a faint touch of blush on my cheeks. I’ll try not to make that mistake again. From now forward, I’ll simply call you Uncle Jeff, since Florida claims Cousin.
JEFF WAS RIGHT ABOUT HER FATHER, he was ready for a wedding and to wish the couple well and send them on their way. But V’s mother put up a fight. Her judgment was to let the courtship proceed, but no wedding for at least a year—certainly not before V turned eighteen. So all that spring and summer, Jeff’s love letters followed a formula. Each one started out rational and conversational in tone but then soon built to an emotional heft only the French language could bear. Most of them ended with Mon amor, mon petit pomme. He didn’t seem to consider that V’s understanding of the language was a great deal more complete than his and that she would not be impressed with his smatter of misspelled and ungrammatical West Point French. Though to be fair his limited vocabulary did contain more words for artillery pieces and the movements of troops than hers. He saw the French language as a tool, a weapon, rather than a portal into a culture and its history and literature. Eons of loss later, confronted with the reality of Paris—where some of their acquaintances from the war lived in exile—Jeff went twitchy as a squirrel looking at public statuary. V loved the city and was ready to start looking for a nice, cheap apartment with a sliver of river view, but Jeff declared that he could never live in a place where displays of human anatomy flushed themselves in his face every time he took a walk.
As for V’s half of their courtship correspondence, her letters vanished during the war, stolen by the Federal raiders who looted Brierfield and destroyed The Hurricane. Jeff had tied the stack of them with a red ribbon as he had done with Knoxie’s letters. Even the slight possibility that V’s letters survive in a Connecticut or Michigan attic still makes her wish she’d burned them when she had the chance. Most of her correspondence to friends and acquaintances over the decades concluded with a line below the signature: Private—Burn after reading. Happily, she can’t remember a word of her teen love letters to a man more than twice her age.
* * *
V tells James, I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She’s still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she’ll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made. Back then, a good marriage didn’t require love. A good marriage meant security—money and position and a man who didn’t knock you around. We all wanted both, of course—love and security—but mostly we settled for the second and manufactured an attraction to keep from acknowledging the arranged, contractual foundation of the relationship, the mercantile nature of it. All those years, I can’t remember one girl from a good family who settled for only love.
—I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT SOMETHING YOU SAID. That I should write a book.
—I believe I more noted how everybody’s doing it, V says. If Virginia Clay can write a book, anybody can. The main qualification appears to be an ability to sit at a desk for many hours a day. When I wrote Jeff’s memoir, it felt like solitary confinement inside his head. The last day’s work seemed so much like a jailbreak that I set my little pistol on the desk in case I had to shoot my way out. After th
at, I thought I was going to write my own life, but I haven’t. I’ve written all kinds of things to earn my living. For a while I even did a silly etiquette column for the New York World.
Pleasant days back then, she tells James. She had a pretty apartment with a big bay window in the Gerard Hotel—West Forty-Fourth between Sixth and Seventh. Winnie lived there too when she was in town, though she traveled a lot with the Pulitzers, who appreciated her command of several languages and knowledge of art and history. She came in once from spending the worst of winter in Naples and began immediately working every day on a romance set in the South Pacific that she had started on the ship back.
As for V’s writing, giving advice on etiquette was easy. You opened envelopes and considered burning questions readers desperately needed answered—topics such as when and how to wear a high hat, dinner table manners, and how to deal with rude in-laws. V remembers one profound question in particular: How should one use one’s handkerchief in public and not be vulgar? Her answer was: Never—even under the greatest burden of curiosity—open it afterwards and inspect the contents. Another young woman asked how she might respond to a gentleman friend’s request for a lock of hair. V answered in print, That is simply too disgusting for reply. Brides especially required many wise words in regard to every phase of engagement and wedding planning—so much anxiety over correctness. V always tried to advise them to calm down, worry less about trivialities.
Writing of that kind was work, a job. You did it, and a check eventually came, and the rent got paid. That money and a scant income from a couple of inherited farming properties she leased out were her living. Census of 1900, when the man came knocking on her door asking questions, she gave her occupation as Writer and Landlord. In 1880, when Jeff answered the same question for her, he said, Keeps House.